~ Then I'll Tell You the Story of My Life

Please stand by after this brief message from our sponsor…

(“Sponsor” of this blog being my full-time employer, Kaplan University. Without full-time employment, I would be a starving writer. Therefore, today I’m deviating a bit from my usual blog topics to write about higher education. But it all relates–see my postscript.).

Flickr photo by Robert S. Donovan

After reading @Jessifer’s post Wednesday in the classroom, I immediately thought of the open education movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I wrote my master’s thesis on the Symbionese Liberation Army, so I did a lot of reading about radical student groups of the 1960s. Bill Ayers, a member of Students for a Democratic Society, worked at an open education school in Michigan in the 1960s. This was the first I had heard of participant-centered pedagogy. The kids decided what they were interested in, and the teachers adapted instruction accordingly.

My opinion was torn whenever I read of these schools. On one hand, I thought, “How did the children learn everything?” I can see children being interested in reading or art, but are they naturally interested in math? Wouldn’t they just want to play all the time? What about older children? I cannot see many kids choosing to spontaneously learn algebra or anything else that might be “hard” (at least, I wouldn’t have).

On the other hand, I was intrigued by the idea and admired those who felt so strongly about this type of education that they started their own schools. They bristled with energy and creativity, and they had the guts to try something new. I have always admired renegades and aspire to be one myself.

I’m still drawn to the idea of participant-centered pedagogy, maybe because it still seems radical to me. Why shouldn’t teachers help students make discoveries on their own? Why can’t students learn from their peers? I’ve been in this MOOC MOOC for just a couple of days and already I have been exposed to new, creative approaches to higher education. These ideas have come from articles curated by the Hybrid Pedagogy gang, but I’m learning from my peers as we’ve collaborated on an essay and commented on each other’s videos. All the information has come together to lend me a new perspective.

The open education movement in public schools had run its course after a decade. “By the early 1980s, open classrooms had already become a footnote in doctoral dissertations” (Cuban, 2004).

But just because the open classroom movement in public schools did not become the educational revolution some had envisioned does not mean the best of its principles cannot be applied to higher education. Likely, the ideas behind this movement need to be modified and improved upon. Maybe participant-centered pedagogy was not a solution for K-12 education, but perhaps in higher education it can reap rich dividends.

What lessons can we learn from the K-12 open education movement? What caused it to fail, and how can we in higher education avoid the same mistakes? What would make participant-centered pedagogy a success in higher education? I have some ideas, but would love to hear yours!

A postscript about this post’s content and how it relates to my writing career:

I refuse to see the important aspects of my life as discrete and wholly separate from one another. Much as my hands do not look like my feet, they are both part of my body. My different jobs and interests may occupy separate parts of my brain, but they still reside in one larger space.

The following take up large portions of my typical week:

Full-time job: higher education administration at a for-profit university

Spare time: Reader, mostly nonfiction. Triathlete. Finding time each week to swim, bike, and run. Ashtanga yoga if I can fit it in.

Commonalities:

I approach each with creativity. How can I create something new, whether it be a new way to deliver content to students, a new sentence/paragraph/chapter, a new running route or new swim stroke?

I try to do each better every day. How can I be a better writer and teacher? How can I improve upon my work in curriculum? How can I become a faster/stronger swimmer, cyclist, runner?

I see a narrative in all I do. What is a logical beginning, middle, and end to each story? How do I begin a triathlon slowly enough so I leave enough energy for the end, but not so slowly that I’m the last one to finish? How do I build the arc in a story? In a class, how do I take students on an engaging and logical journey?

All have a historical perspective. I’m a student of history. I’m always asking, how has this been done before? How can I improve upon the mistakes of the past? Nothing exists in a vacuum. I recognize that everything has a precedent which should not be ignored.

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

8 thoughts on “Please stand by after this brief message from our sponsor…”

Failure is a matter of perspective. As a student of open-education, I wonder whether perhaps the “failure” came NOT because of what it failed to do for students but because of what it failed to make students become. I know that’s abstract, but it goes back to the central question of the purpose of education–why educate? (I’m interested in the questions you’re asking, and as far as I’m concerned, interesting questions are the really important component of exploration/education.)

Great questions, Tracy! We definitely have to redefine “failure” in so many aspects. One of my favorite documentaries is ART & COPY. At one advertising agency, the first thing you see when you come into the door is “Fail Harder” in big letters on the wall. The agency recognizes that great ideas only come about after other ones have failed. It really gave me a different perspective on failure. But “failure” in education has a lot of negative connotations.

I think “failure” always connotes something negative. I guess the questions I find most interesting are who does education serve, and who should it serve? It fails when it fails to serve…society, the student’s potential, the investor, whose agenda?

I mentioned you in my blog today and also linked to you. If I got anything not quite right, please let me know so I can edit it. (But I’m pretty sure it’s all right). If you don’t want to leave a comment on the blog itself, you could email me a t (dot) l (dot) karner (at) att.net
The post is a small thank you–and a musing about how connections & coincidences happen.

I love that you re-blogged. Like you, I’m new to this experience (since March this year); and have had ambivalent feelings about it at times, because it can seem like any new thing, weird and uncomfortable at first. But now that I’m finding the people I KNEW were out there, it’s becoming really fun.

Wow–Waseca. I used go to the fair there every summer. We might have been on the tilt-a-whirl at the same time.